To Measure What Tests Can't, Some Schools Turn To Surveys
Last year Susan Avey, the principal of Bogle Junior High School in Chandler, Ariz., had a heart-to-heart with one of her new teachers about how he was relating to students.
In a previous year, this might have been a conversation based on subjective impressions. The teacher might have gotten defensive. But this year, Avey had a new tool up her sleeve: a survey of her students.
"He came in to talk to me and said, 'I felt like I had really good relationships with kids, but reading my comments I was surprised that I wasn't rated as highly.' "
Drilling down into the results, they found that the teacher's relationships with girls, specifically, were weaker than those with the boys. The teacher was also a coach, and it turned out he liked to use a lot of sports analogies in class. Maybe that habit was missing the mark with non-sports enthusiasts?
This little data-driven a-ha moment is happening more often at schools around the country.
A growing battery of school leaders, researchers and policymakers think surveys are the best tool available right now to measure important social and emotional goals for schools and students — qualities like grit, growth mindset, student engagement or, as in the Chandler example, student-teacher relationships.
And a group of big-city districts in California, with the federal government's permission, is getting ready to incorporate this kind of survey data into their accountability systems this spring.
That means students' states of mind will be weighted alongside test scores and graduation rates when rating schools. It's a move other states will be watching, as the draft version of the new federal education bill includes language asking states to incorporate at least one measure that is not strictly academic in school accountability systems.
The CORE Movement
Nine of the biggest school districts in California — Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento City, San Francisco, Sanger and Santa Ana Unified — banded together to receive their own separate waiver from the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law in 2013.
A waiver is like a permission slip to create your own formula for improving schools; the Department of Education has granted 43 to various states in the past few years to provide flexibility from federal law. This is the only waiver that has gone to a group of districts instead of a whole state.
It's also the only waiver in the country to focus this much on social and emotional targets.
The CORE districts, as they were known, drew up a School Quality Improvement System that relied 60 percent on traditional academics, and 40 percent on "social-emotional and culture-climate" factors. This 40 percent includes indicators the schools were already collecting: on chronic absenteeism, suspension and expulsion rates. But To Measure What Tests Can't, Some Schools Turn To Surveys : NPR Ed : NPR:
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